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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

Gon need some citations there boss. Most studies I've seen of this show no or only a very weak link between enforcement and crime rates. There are a ton of confounding variables & broader trends and it's very difficult to make confident assertions about it. It is mostly only the police and police affiliates who release "studies" that strongly correlate these.

What you're saying makes intuitive sense but it turns out people are not for the most part destined for criminality or not. It's a social phenomenon that responds to social pressures and incentives. If you arrest all the criminals in an area, the pressures that created them will create a new batch of criminals, in fact are already creating them.

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Do some first hand research. Pick 5 recent murder arrests in your area and look up there other arrests. Look at the records of people that were just processed through your local jail.

Yes it's typically police that release these reports because it's their business.

Police in Atlanta found that 1000 people out of the whole city were responsible for 40% of crime in one year. And these 1000 people were repeat offenders that already had at least 3 felony convictions.

Like that is wild, but it's not remotely even surprising if you are in any way involved in street level crime.

We don't need a study to prove that policing is effective at stopping or preventing crime. I don't actually know what you're suggesting we do instead. But until you can show me a study that shows a community with zero crime based on some "social pressure" solution I'm not listening.

That's certainly a... stance.... Personally I'd like to know that the force we put hundreds of billions of dollars towards every year does have an effect.

Why is the burden here zero crime? Are you showing me a community that does have police and has zero crime? Our current solution is expensive and terrible, an alternative needs to be merely better not perfect.

I know in advance you're not listening because you told me so, and because it's what I expect from people who are happy with the current atrocities and human rights violations we call policing.

I found this https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/20/988769793/when... an excerpt about a study by Morgan C. Williams Jr. that states their study shows more police does reduce crime in an area. In looking for this I ran into a lot of statistics especially those that show crime has largely dropped since the early 90's but peoples perception of non-local crime has gone up. I blame the media.

And if you don't arrest them, not only will they commit crimes, but a new batch of criminals will also commit crimes. This is not a question of enforcement or prevention, this is a question of doing both.

That's another way of saying about the same thing. Which, again, is intuitive and sounds correct. But again, most studies I've seen of this show no or only a very weak link between enforcement and crime rates. Except those issued by the police themselves. Where have you gotten this information?

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